


Golden

by interabang



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Minor Character Death, Revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-20
Updated: 2008-07-20
Packaged: 2019-07-12 22:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interabang/pseuds/interabang
Summary: This is an exploration of Elle Bishop's past: how she may have been as a young girl, her relationship with her father, and how her life was inside the Company walls.





	Golden

****When she was ten years old, Elle Bishop came to a startling realization: she’d never seen her father cry.

 

His eyes did get misty sometimes when he’d come to her hospital room.  But then he’d turn away, and back again, and the previous watery ducts would seem like they had just been an illusion.  Tricks being played on his little girl’s mind.

 

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she’d ask, keeping her voice tentative but not too prying.  Even though she knew that she’d never get an honest answer out of him, she couldn’t keep from wondering all the same.

 

On her birthday, she had asked him this very same question.  He blinked rapidly for a while, then smiled thinly and told her that he was just proud of how strong she was being, proud of being so patient with the tests that the doctors were giving her.

 

Then he gave her a small cage with a canary inside of it; a small, bright yellow creature that won Elle’s heart the moment she peered through the wire casing.

 

“Daddy, I love you!” she exclaimed, but she couldn’t jump up to hug her father due to the needles and tubes had been currently attached to her skin.

 

He nodded, then strode out of the room on the pretense of having to Get Some Work Done.  When he closed the door behind him, Elle gazed in complete rapture at the cage resting next to her bed, watching the little creature hop around and preen its tiny wings.

 

She wondered why Bob Bishop looked so sad whenever he came to see her.

 

 

 

Elle wouldn’t stop thrashing in her bed, even after the nurses came in to hold her down.  They injected her with something clear in a syringe, which made her loosen her grip on someone’s arm and fall back onto the hard mattress.  She rested her head against the pillow, and managed to catch one last glimpse of her pet as it was carried out of the room before she blacked out.

She cried when she woke up later, after remembering how still the animal had looked and how his feathers were charred and burnt.  She had to be moved to a different room because the rank smell in her original one had been so horribly pungent.

Bob looked down on her as she was being situated on a new bed with crisp, white sheets.  His eyes strayed to the bag of liquid that was dripping silently into her system, and then he looked back at her, meeting her vacant but cheery gaze.

_Why do you look so sad, Daddy?_ she had wanted to say to him.  Instead, her eyes fluttered to a close, and she dreamed of walking around and around the empty, clean hallways of the hospital wing, with her canary flying about her head and twittering joyfully.

They didn't go outside.

 

 

 

As far back as she could remember, Elle and Bob did not talk about her mother.  Elle knew very little about her: she had died when Elle was very young, and she had been a wonderful woman.  Elle could have sworn that her father had told her, _“You look just like she did, Honey,”_ but it was the kind of thing that the little girl wasn’t sure if she had heard in her dreams, or rather that she had heard it years and years ago.

Weeks after Elle had accidentally electrocuted her bird, after she had been regulated on a heavy dosage of medication and slipped in and out of consciousness, she was suddenly fully aware of her surroundings and the fact that her father was sitting on the edge of her bed.  He looked tired and pale, but his worn features seemed to light up when she stirred and asked him for some water.

He watched her drink it, but he didn’t scold her after she had spilled a little down her front.  She placed the cup shakily on the table next to her bed, and said:

“What happened to Tweety?”

He averted her eyes as he responded.  “They buried him outside, next to the building.  I can take you to go see him, if you want.”

“Okay,” Elle said quietly, though this seemed like another one of _those_ promises Daddy made to make her feel better.  She couldn’t remember the last time he took her down to the store for ice cream, for a walk around the huge building in which she was practically living.

This new train of thought made her want to ask him when she could come home, but she already knew, even at her age, how his answer wouldn’t be straightforward nor honest.  So she went in a different direction, her words slow but steady:

“Did I kill Mommy, too?”

He looked taken aback at first, then he shook his head, simultaneously removing his glasses from his face and rubbing his brow with his free hand. 

“No.  No you didn’t, Sweetheart,” he replied.  His voice sounded slightly muffled as he spoke out from under his palm.

“But then what happened to her?” she asked in a curious tone, and Bob took his hand away from his face to give her a look, suddenly sharp and admonishing.

“I told you, she died when you were very young.  Now please, try to get some rest.”  He stood up, placing his glasses back on single-handedly.

“I _have_ been resting,” Elle snapped back.  “I’ve been resting ever since you brought me here.”

“Don’t take that tone with me.  I’m trying to help you.”

“You can’t!”  Her response almost came out as a shriek.  “I’m going to be a freak forever, stuck in here without friends, or pets, or… or…” She faltered for a moment; tears sprang to her eyes, but not her father’s, as usual.  “You’ll probably leave me, and then I won’t have a family anymore!”

Bob sighed, which caught Elle off-guard even as she began to cry.  He took one step over to the head of the bed, and he rested one of his hands on the top of her head.

Smoothing her hair down, he said gently, “I’ll never leave you here by yourself.  No matter what you do, I’ll never, _ever_ leave you.  And you’re not a freak, you know.”

He picked up the ceramic cup next to Elle, and she wiped her tears away, watching in quiet awe as it slowly turned into gold.

Putting it back down, Bob told her briefly that she was not in any ordinary hospital.  He told her that there were more people inside the building who, like the Bishops, could do strange and powerful things, but they had to be controlled because sometimes, they could not control themselves.

“Like me?”  Elle asked in a small voice, and Bob nodded, though his expression was not unkind.  “Well… does that mean I’ll have to stay in here forever?”

“No.  You’re doing much better than you did a few years ago, when you had no idea how to control yourself.  Now that you’re older, you can learn to hold it in, and use it when _you_ want to.  The ability won’t control you anymore, not while I’m still here.”

Elle’s eyes widened as she took in the new information.  Her mind raced through new mental images: thoughts of her running through parks, going to school with other children, and playing with pets she couldn’t kill and friends she couldn’t scare off with her electricity.  She opened her mouth to ask more questions, but her father looked even more tired and aged than he did mere minutes ago, when she’d asked if she had caused her own mother’s death.

“I need to go back to work,” he said, and she closed her mouth, raising her arm to wave after him as he turned around and left.  She let it fall to rest back on her stomach; then, after tilting her head a little, she looked down at her fingers and wiggled them, imagining sparks flying out the ends and stopping short of the sheets underneath her hand.

She concentrated on making the sparks appear, until she gave up on her fruitless attempts and fell asleep before the sun went down.

 

 

 

She dreamed of a woman who looked like her (except taller and prettier), who moved with the grace and poise of a dancer.  Elle dreamed of the both of them laughing together, running in the middle of a yard and falling down to rest on the dewy, freshly mown grass.

Then the scene shifted, and Elle looked up to see a doorknob looming above her head, as though she were much smaller than she actually was.  Her gaze passed over the doorknob, and she noticed the crack of light peeking out between the frame; she wouldn’t have to try to reach up and turn the heavy, brass circle.

She pushed the door open with a tiny, chubby hand, and saw a large bed with two figures on it.  The light had diminished as soon as she had entered the room, so she couldn’t see everything in perfect detail, but she could tell that the bigger figure on the edge of the bed was weeping into open hands, weeping so profusely that the sad person didn’t even notice Elle making her entrance.

On the other side of the bed, Elle could just make out the other person, but they were lying down and not moving at all.  Elle walked over to get a closer look, and –

She awoke with a jerk; her whole body shook for minutes after she had snapped awake.  She had caught a single glimpse of the figure she had been trying to get a better view of, and that sight would be etched in her memory for as long as she would live.

A woman had lain upon the bed in front of Elle, looking eternally peaceful and beautiful as the man beside her sobbed continuously.  The woman’s eyes were closed, but her cheekbones greatly resembled Elle’s, and her smile did too, though it was frozen permanently, like the rest of her entire body.

The woman made of gold slept on in front of the child, oblivious to her confused, little girl and her crying husband.  That was when Elle had woken up and her body began to shake, despite the sheets and blankets resting on top of her.

After she turned over to her side in an attempt to stop her quivering, lightning seemed to erupt from her palm, setting her bed on fire.

 

 

 

She wouldn’t look into her father’s eyes for several days after the incident.  When he’d turn around to leave the room, she snapped her focus onto him, watching his back as he made his swift escapes.

_Daddy… why didn’t you tell me?_   The words would always die on her lips, then she’d purse them shut and squeeze her eyelids together, hoping that when she would open them, she would see her mother before her and not the empty, white room.

She wondered to herself if maybe, just maybe, she could have made up the whole dream on her own, that she had taken the half-stories of her mother and lumped them together with what her father had shown her just before she had fallen asleep.  However, the dream had seemed so _real_ , so accurate and yet hazy, that it had to have been a distant memory.  Elle’s mother hadn’t died, but she might as well have.  And the person responsible for her fate was still unwilling to admit to his very own daughter what he had done so long ago.

Elle breathed heavily out through her nose as she contemplated the dream, the image of her mother lying peacefully on the bed.  Elle opened her eyes to find herself trapped again in the small, bare room, and her shoulders sagged a little.

Then, she brought up her hand to her face.  She looked directly at her index finger, which she pointed straight up to the ceiling.  Stared at it until, finally, a small spark shot out of the end, but not enough to set her bed ablaze.

She relaxed her concentration, just for a moment before she began to focus on her finger with renewed resolution.

 

 

 

By the time Elle became a teenager, she could already electrocute specific objects on command, and she did so with complete glee and gusto.  Bob would look at her, his expression indiscernible, but he spoke encouraging words to his daughter and, surprisingly, took her outside a few times to see the small grave of her former pet.

A couple of days before Elle would turn thirteen, both her and her father went downstairs to the small, well-kept garden in which a small patch of dirt and rocks indicated where Tweety had been laid to rest. 

She stared down at it with her father by her side, and, clenching her hand slightly, she said, “I know what you did to her.”

The man did not turn to meet her eyes like she thought he would.  He kept his focus on the little grave in front of them, his hands still buried deep in his pockets.

Elle went on, despite his lack of a reaction:  “It was an accident, Daddy, I know it was, and you can’t blame yourself for it.  It was probably like what I used to do, before I learned to control myself and - ”

“That’s enough, Elle,” he said softly, firmly, and the girl fell silent, but she remained eager to supply him with enough assurances and explanations to last him a whole lifetime.

He didn’t ask for any.  He just kept looking down at the tiny little grave, and Elle could see, even though he was wearing glasses, the tear that beaded at the corner of his eye and threatened to spill down his cheek.

He turned away then, leaving his daughter to stand by herself and stare at his back for a moment.  She had a sudden, fleeting thought of running, of going in the opposite direction; electrocuting the guards at the gate and running until she was finally free of the needles and too-firm bed and the sad, sad eyes of her one remaining parent… but then, she thought of her mother, and Elle realized that she was now sure of the memory she had of herself being likened to the woman.  The golden, peaceful woman.

Elle started forward, following Mr. Bishop.  She hurried after him and immediately slowed her pace as she walked beside the dejected-looking man.  Slipping her fingers around his buried wrist, she silently coaxed him to pull his hand out of his pocket, and entwine his fingers around hers.

He did so, slowly, and as they walked hand-in-hand back into the building that Elle now came to know as home, a small smile started at the corner of first her mouth, then his.


End file.
